One night, a month into her sojourn in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Olya woke up in alarm. She had distinctly felt something scurry over her pregnant belly. She jumped off the bed and turned on the lights just in time to see two rats rounding the corner.
“Alek!” she screamed. “Rats!”
“What! Who’s there?”
“A rat just ran over your future child. We have to move out of here. You have to talk to someone about this first thing in the morning.”
Alek made a sour face. “I’m still new here.”
“What does that matter?”
“Well, unfortunately it’s my duty to put up with the inconveniences. I’m a soldier first and an officer second,” he said without conviction.
“Yes, that might be the soldier’s duty, but not his wife and child’s. There is no war going on. I didn’t follow you here like some—” She wanted to say “Gulag prisoner’s wife” but caught herself. It wasn’t safe to yell such things in the middle of the night, especially when the walls were thin enough for rats to chew through. “Like a Decembrist’s wife! Do you want your baby to be eaten by rats?”
Alek put his head in his hands and stayed like that for so long, Olya thought he’d gone back to sleep. He wore a holey undershirt, which she hadn’t yet mended, and, generally, did not look like a husband at all.
“Why don’t you talk to them?” Alek said through his hands, then looked up. “It will be more effective. They’ll take one look at you — your condition — and do anything you say.”
Olya went to the housing office the following morning and yelled at the director, a bald, glistening fellow in an ill-fitting uniform. She never did pay much attention to rank. He listened, leering at her thin shoulders, legs, ankles. He even grinned when Olya said she was afraid to go to bed at night because of the rats. She almost threw up in disgust after leaving his office.
A week later they were moved into a room in the two-room communal apartment with a shared kitchen. Their neighbor was an old army doctor, Vasily Petrovich, who kept to himself. This place was newer and had no rats, just cockroaches. It even had an indoor toilet, though no running water.
* * *
I love it here very much. It’s not for the weak of heart … Olya described her new life in vivid detail in her letters home. She knew her mother would read them aloud over dinner, and she hoped her parents, overwhelmed by pride, and Zoya, dumbfounded by jealousy, would talk about her in the stores’ waiting lines and at the Komsomol meetings, and eventually the news would reach Odessa. She didn’t love Kostya anymore, but she wanted him to know that her life didn’t end when he left. On the contrary, it had only properly begun.
Olya found much to like about Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Yes, its streets and squares were not as wide and lush with trees as those of Stavropol. Even the standard five-story khrushchyovkas seemed lower than back home, huddled together in tight neighborhoods to take cover from the long winter’s callous wind. Yet she felt invigorated and alive in a city surrounded by active volcanoes. Anywhere she looked, she saw their pyramidal outlines in scarves of clouds, white and mystical against the blue sky. During her first earthquake, the ceiling lamp swung wildly and the teacups tumbled from the table. Alek had warned her that mild earthquakes happened about once every three months, and after that first one Olya was thrilled like a rookie sailor after his first big storm. Nothing this exciting ever happened in Stavropol.
Alek came back from flights to inspect the radio towers in the mountains full of admiration for Kamchatka’s nature. Such beauty! Such romance! He told her about the Uzon Caldera, the site of a giant extinct volcano. The hollow, surrounded by steep walls, was a veritable museum of Kamchatka, with poisonous mud cauldrons, hot springs, and bogs. Enormous bears bathed in the cold rivers and swans honked near the small, warm lakes. One time, as a very special present, Alek snuck Olya with him on one of these trips. It was strictly forbidden for civilians, but the commander of the helicopter owed him a big favor, Alek had said. When Olya saw from the air the famous Maly Semyachik, she held her breath and thought of her sisters. On the one hand, she felt guilty that they couldn’t see the crater, with its black beach and the unimaginably bright, sometimes turquoise, sometimes green acid lake. They had never even been off the ground. On the other hand, she was vigilantly possessive of her new experiences. Maybe that made her a bad person — a selfish Soviet citizen in the eyes of Zoya — but now that Olya was married, she wanted to be the first in everything, she wanted every sensation for herself. Her soul, dislocated from its warm nest, had become a more sensitive instrument. Back in town, she would pick up on a deep underwater humming whenever she approached the bay. She felt it churn the blood in her veins, raising her body temperature and levels of optimism. She thought it was the surge of adrenaline due to the rapid changes in her life: the pregnancy, the marriage, the new city. Decades later, after declassification, she would find out that Russia’s largest atomic submarine base had been just across the bay.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s seasonal capitulation was sudden and intense. The surrounding tundra burned with scarlet until October, and the birch forests stood drenched in gold. The temperature dropped overnight. On her way to the grocery store in the mornings, Olya could hear the hoar-frosted leaves falling with a jingle. The gusting wind brought the scent of sea and winter. First snow fell in early November.
In the first few months of marriage Olya learned the following about Alek. One: his father had died on the last day of the war. His mother, doubting she could raise two boys by herself, had sent Alek and his brother to the Stavropol branch of the Suvorov Military School, not uncommon for so many fatherless boys of the postwar years. Two: as long as there was hot dinner on the table and a pack of Belomorkanal cigarettes on the bureau, Alek was content. And three: he loved to play preferans, which his mother had taught him on his breaks from the military school. One of his card buddies was the helicopter commander who had flown Olya over Maly Semyachik.
When Alek won, he came home cheerfully tipsy, with presents for Olya — usually chocolate bars with white, blotchy coating from the canteen on base. He gave her all his winnings, danced her around their little room, and felled her on their little bed. His veiny hands hovered centimeters above her swollen stomach, then slid between her legs. His eyes filled with glassy determination. His paltry mustache tickled her unpleasantly, and she kept whispering, “Not so loud, just not so loud, please. Vasily Petrovich will hear.”
After Alek fell asleep, she crashed back into her sore body. She must not have been in love just yet. But she would be soon, when the baby came — at the latest. It was hard to think of either Dasha or Zoya doing this with a man, and even more impossible and revolting to imagine them enjoying it. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was scared for them to find out the truth on their own and blame her for not warning them.